It’s clear at this point that something’s not quite right with Gerrit Cole. In his last four starts, counting last night, he’s only thrown 23 innings, opponents are hitting .300/.354/.456 against him, and as a result, he’s got a 4.70 ERA. On a few nights he’s been dinged by awful Pirate defense behind him (the Cardinal start in particular) and perhaps as a result of that opponents have a .394 BABIP against him in these four starts, but it’s hard to find much bad defense to blame last night’s ugly result on other than Gregory Polanco’s misplayed leadoff triple, that didn’t really matter either way.
It would be easy to assume that the season is simply wearing Cole out, since he’s got over 100 pitches 14 times in his last 18 starts after topping that mark just 12 times in the first two seasons of his big league career. I don’t think the Pirates would just blindly run one of their most valuable assets into the ground, though, and there’s absolutely no change in velocity in these last four starts, so maybe it’s not fatigue.
I have a pet theory, and it’s something I’ve been kicking around since the last time Cole played the Reds. I think Cole might be tipping his pitches. I am awful at spotting this sort of thing live and so I have no visual evidence, but a couple things in that Reds series stood out to me. The first was Cole’s strikeout of Brandon Phillips in the first inning on a nasty slider. Phillips was frozen in the box by the pitch, stood, stared at Cole, walked to the dugout, and pointed to his eyes, mouthing, “I couldn’t see it.” Tim Neverett seemed to think that this was a big compliment to Cole, but it seemed off to me. That coupled with the number of times that I’ve heard John Wehner say, “You know, Cole made a really good pitch there, but Todd Frazier just dropped his bat on it and found a way to hit it,” really go me wondering. At first I thought that maybe the Reds had stolen the Pirates’ signs, but they didn’t seem to have as much success that night with anyone but Cole. The three starts since then have looked a lot like his starts against the Reds this year. He’s making pitches, and his stuff looks fine, but teams are hitting him.
The piece of data that’s really interesting to me are the swing numbers. From Opening Day through July 31st, opponents swung at ~45% of his fastballs, 54% of his two-seamers, 37% of his changeups, and 49% of his sliders. Since August 1 (the run of four games starting with that last Reds start), they’ve swung at 51% of his fastballs, 57% of his two-seamers, 42% of his changeups, and 60% of his sliders. That’s an across the board increase with a marked increase in swings at his sliders. His whiff rate on those pitches has all ticked up marginally, which makes sense with more swings, but the foul rate on the sliders has shot up. Before August, hitters were fouling off 14% of Cole’s sliders and how it’s 24%. As a result, they’re getting his two-seamer and changeup into play more regularly.
Before we go further, I’ll apply the usual caveat: these aren’t huge changes in percentages, and without running some statistics on it it’s impossible to say whether the change here is noise or bad luck or Cole tipping his pitches. The sample size on the August pitches, his changeups in particular, are obviously smaller and thus more unreliable. It’s possible that I’m grasping at straws here, but I feel like this is all a question that’s at least worth asking if you stick with the premise that there’s no evidence that Cole’s tiring, which I don’t think that there is. The whole thing certainly fits the profile of a guy tipping his pitches, though: if hitters know whether a fastball or slider is coming, they can look for the slider and foul it off, waiting for him to come back with a straight pitch to put into play. Without the element of surprise, a changeup is not a hugely useful pitch. I’ve written this in the past, but Cole’s success comes from the way that his pitches bleed into each other: his four-seamer and two-seamer bleed together, his two-seamer and changeup bleed together, the velocity on the change masks the slider even further, and his slider and curve are really similar pitches with slightly different break. Essentially, Cole throws a spectrum of pitches that all behave differently but are also similar enough that as a hitter, you might not know which pitch you saw even after seeing it. If Cole is tipping his slider, though, suddenly all of that’s lost. It lets hitters foul the pitch off to wait for a fastball or changeup.
I’ll close by reiterating that this is just a hypothesis. As I said, I’m personally bad at spotting this sort of thing live, and so I don’t have visual evidence. You can see that Cole’s slider hasn’t been dropping quite as much lately, and so the answer could be simpler: hitters have picked up on his slider not being as sharp, giving them a chance to foul it off as opposed to stare at it. The changing swing percentages is what makes me think there’s more to it than that — hitters are whiffing on the slider at the same rate, they’re just swinging more and fouling it off more. That makes me wonder if they know it’s coming. Whatever the case, Cole’s slider isn’t as effective as it was in the early part of the season, and that’s why he’s struggling now. The Pirates have to get Cole’s slider back on track to get him back on track.
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